Header overlay

Fertile Ground

When I was a child, I was fascinated by much that was American. I particularly enjoyed Californian grapefruit, chewing gum, Westerns, Stuart Little and the covers and cartoons of the New Yorker. A dozen enormous grapefruit would arrive in a box every Christmas, sent by a cousin of my mother’s, while chewing gum (‘that dreadful American habit!’ according to my teachers) was forbidden, so its consumption was deliciously furtive. We watched thrilling Westerns on our black-and-white television at weekends and I delighted in the sublime children’s story Stuart Little, never thinking that a tale about the mouse-child of a New York couple was at all an odd idea. Most of all, I loved the cartoons in the New Yorker, a magazine I fell upon every time we visited my aunt and uncle. They had lived for some years in the States in the 1950s, when my uncle was Washington correspondent of the Observer. These enlightened relatives even owned a large cupboard that was decorated with New Yorker covers.

I wonder now whether the memory of the New Yorker and Stuart Little was the reason why, some years ago, I bought a second-hand copy of Onward and Upward in the Garden by Katharine S. White. Or perhaps it was simply a desire to prove my Anglocentric friends wrong when they airily dismissed American garden writers as not being a patch on their British counterparts. Whatever the cause, I am glad I did, for I found a sympathetic writer, one with a keen eye, a refreshing rigour and an attractively dry sense of humour.

Onward and Upward in the Garden is an anthology of fourteen long New Yorker articles, collected and introduced by Katharine’s husband E. B. White, a brilliant essayist and the author of my much-loved Stuart Little, as well as that other children’s

Subscribe or sign in to read the full article

The full version of this article is only available to subscribers to Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly. To continue reading, please sign in or take out a subscription to the quarterly magazine for yourself or as a gift for a fellow booklover. Both gift givers and gift recipients receive access to the full online archive of articles along with many other benefits, such as preferential prices for all books and goods in our online shop and offers from a number of like-minded organizations. Find out more on our subscriptions page.

Subscribe now or

When I was a child, I was fascinated by much that was American. I particularly enjoyed Californian grapefruit, chewing gum, Westerns, Stuart Little and the covers and cartoons of the New Yorker. A dozen enormous grapefruit would arrive in a box every Christmas, sent by a cousin of my mother’s, while chewing gum (‘that dreadful American habit!’ according to my teachers) was forbidden, so its consumption was deliciously furtive. We watched thrilling Westerns on our black-and-white television at weekends and I delighted in the sublime children’s story Stuart Little, never thinking that a tale about the mouse-child of a New York couple was at all an odd idea. Most of all, I loved the cartoons in the New Yorker, a magazine I fell upon every time we visited my aunt and uncle. They had lived for some years in the States in the 1950s, when my uncle was Washington correspondent of the Observer. These enlightened relatives even owned a large cupboard that was decorated with New Yorker covers.

I wonder now whether the memory of the New Yorker and Stuart Little was the reason why, some years ago, I bought a second-hand copy of Onward and Upward in the Garden by Katharine S. White. Or perhaps it was simply a desire to prove my Anglocentric friends wrong when they airily dismissed American garden writers as not being a patch on their British counterparts. Whatever the cause, I am glad I did, for I found a sympathetic writer, one with a keen eye, a refreshing rigour and an attractively dry sense of humour. Onward and Upward in the Garden is an anthology of fourteen long New Yorker articles, collected and introduced by Katharine’s husband E. B. White, a brilliant essayist and the author of my much-loved Stuart Little, as well as that other children’s classic, Charlotte’s Web. Katharine had spent most of her working life as fiction editor for the New Yorker and these articles were published between 1958 and 1970. She died in 1977, and Onward and Upward appeared two years later, a tender homage to her talents and personality by a bereft husband. Katharine Sergeant came from an impeccably upper-crust East Coast family, both her parents being descendants of families that had come to America from England in the seventeenth century. Her childhood was spent in Brookline, Massachusetts, close to Boston and down the road from Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum. She graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1914. Every account I have read of her time at the New Yorker mentions how meticulous she was as an editor. (Her discussions with John Updike on punctuation, and in particular the dash and the colon, became the stuff of legend.) She married, first, Eric Angell and bore him two children, one of whom, Roger, would also become a fiction editor at the New Yorker. In 1925, she persuaded Harold Ross, the founder of the recently launched magazine, to take on E. B. (‘Andy’) White. She left Eric Angell for White and they married in 1929 and had a son. The celebrated essayist and the discerning fiction editor must have made a powerful celebrity couple in the years before and after the Second World War. It is easy to forget, these days, just how influential White and the New Yorker were in shaping American literary culture, in particular giving space and encouragement to writers such as John O’Hara, Mary McCarthy, Vladimir Nabokov and John Updike. Adam Begley, the author of a biography of Updike, describes the relationship between editor and writer:
Ten years after her death in 1977, [Updike] wrote about the warmth she conveyed, ‘her aristocratic sureness of taste’, her ‘instinctive courage and integrity’, her ‘ethical ardor’; he also stressed that her ‘good humor and resilience were as conspicuous as her dignity and (when provoked) her hauteur’.
In 1933, the Whites bought a farm at North Brooklin on the coast of Maine, where they weekended until 1957, when they moved there permanently. This was where Katharine did her gardening or, more accurately, garden overseeing, for her health was not good and much of the practical work was done by someone else. The articles she wrote coincided with a golden age of ‘chatty’ garden books in Britain – although ‘chatty’ is too dismissive a word for the often amusing, always illuminating, ruminations of intelligent, hard-working amateur gardeners – but there were, at the time, very few American writers who could match them. In truth, Katharine White’s New Yorker pieces are not straightforward gardening articles but rather extended reviews of books and nursery catalogues; however, much horticultural and personal information is imparted in the process, making me fervently grateful that I live on an island with a temperate maritime climate, for it is a much easier place in which to garden than the north-east coast of America. She used these reviews to tell tales of her childhood and her gardening life, and to round up other books on the subject under review which had appealed to her. She was in thrall to the romance of nursery and seed catalogues, with all the promise they hold out for a more colourful and satisfactory garden future. I am glad that she did not see the day when the Internet quite destroyed that romance. She was a woman of decided opinions: she had a particular down on plants that had been made stunted and vulgar by breeders, zinnias being an egregious example. Her first ever article was entitled ‘A Romp in the Catalogues’ and it must have given the magazine’s readers quite a jolt. I wonder what the eminent nurseryman David Burpee thought of her strictures on the names of antirrhinums:
‘Snaps’ is Burpee’s word, not mine. I detest the cozy flower abbreviations. ‘Mums’ is probably the most repellent of the lot, unless it is ‘Glads’, but 1959 gave us a new nasty – ‘Dels’, for the lordly delphiniums. And here she is on the subject of Gladiolus: Half my prejudice [against gladioli] may lie in this flower’s uneuphonious name, with its awkward plural, and especially in its horrid nickname. I can not be glad about glads.
She loved the wildflowers she knew in Maine, writing affectionately of the distinctly euphoniously named bloodroot, black cohosh, Dutchman’s breeches, ladies’ slipper, cardinal flower, cat tail and Turk’s cap lily. I particularly enjoyed her description of picking fragrant water lilies from a small boat on Lake Chocorua as a girl. It is interesting to note that already, in the 1960s, she was expressing unease at the accelerating loss of biodiversity in America. In that regard she was ahead of her time. I am not sure that I can entirely articulate the appeal of a book that describes nurseries of which I have never heard and which probably no longer exist, with descriptions of plants that I don’t know, and a gardening climate and conditions so different to my own. I think it is because Katharine White seems to value her readers and wishes to communicate with them – to share a joke about the eccentricity of gardening folk, but also to elicit our admiration for their fundamental decency and skills. And, for a woman who earned her living making something of other people’s words, it is not surprising that, when there were no longer Updikes or Nabokovs to encourage, she should turn to the devisers of catalogues. She maintained that she found writing very difficult, and her husband confirmed this in the book’s introduction:
Katharine’s act of composition often achieved the turbulence of a shoot-out. The editor in her fought the writer every inch of the way; the struggle was felt all through the house. She would write eight or ten words, then draw her gun and shoot them down. This made for slow and torturous going. It was simple warfare – the editor ready to nip the writer before she committed all the sins and errors the editor clearly foresaw.
Paradoxically, ‘Her letters flowed naturally from her in a clear and steady stream, a warm current of affection, concern, and eagerness to get through to the mind of the recipient.’ This I can confirm for, in the process of researching this piece, I discovered that there was a published compilation of more than 150 letters between Katharine White and Elizabeth Lawrence, a distinguished gardening writer from Charlotte, North Carolina. They had formed a strong, touching and enlivening epistolary friendship, beginning when Elizabeth wrote Katharine a fan letter after she had read ‘A Romp in the Catalogues’. Elizabeth Lawrence, the professional, gave much useful advice to Katharine White, the amateur, especially widening her knowledge of nurseries and plants, and describing gardening conditions in a very different climate from that of Maine. Two Gardeners: A Friendship in Letters was sensitively edited by Emily Herring Wilson and published in 2002 by Beacon Press. It is a delight to read, because the two women have plainly recognized in each other a kindred spirit, despite the difference in their gardening circumstances. Elizabeth, according to Katharine, was ‘a classicist, and can cite Virgil and the English poets as freely as she does Gertrude Jekyll and Jane Loudon’. She wrote to her, ‘You are my candidate always for an American who writes on gardening subjects as well as the English do.’ That makes two of them.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 78 © Ursula Buchan 2023


About the contributor

Ursula Buchan is sorry that she was born both too late and in the wrong place to meet these two remarkable women. You can hear her in Episode 9 of our podcast, discussing the history of garden writing.

Comments & Reviews

Leave a comment

Sign up to our e-newsletter

Sign up for dispatches about new issues, books and podcast episodes, highlights from the archive, events, special offers and giveaways.